Comparing absentee and precinct voters: Voting on direct legislation

This paper addresses issues related to how absentee voters actually cast their ballots on propositions. If the liberalization of absentee laws changed either the composition or behavior of the electorate, then the outcome of the election may be affected. This paper tests whether the electoral behavior of absentee and precinct voters differs in regards to voting on propositions. The analysis is based on a sample of actual absentee and precinct voter ballots drawn from the approximately three million ballots cast in Los Angeles county for the 1992 general election. The analysis uses a nested model of voter participation and is estimated using the weighted exogenous sampling maximum likelihood method. We find that precinct and absentee voters do differ on both the propositions on which they cast votes and in their propensity to vote Yes for a proposition. For example, absentees appear to vote on fewer bonds and initiatives than do precinct voters. They also vote on fewer propositions dealing with state taxes, food taxes, and property taxes. In addition, given that a voter casts a valid vote, the propensity for absentee voters to vote Yes is higher on initiatives and propositions related to education, welfare, and health care than it is for precinct voters.     

Management strategy for economic and social development: Part II

The new and rapidly changing environment of development administrators includes (1) the emergence of a world society of interdependent nations, (2) a rapid and confusing technological and scientific revolution, (3) the expansion of service societies in industrialized countries, (4) new major alternatives for war, neocolonialism, despotism and materialism, and (5) development problems of ascending complexity and difficulty.Post-industrial beginnings in modern management arise from a background of management thought and technique in agricultural epochs and the more recent industrial revolution. They encompass computer technology; operations research; systems approaches, including systems engineering, management information systems, and general systems research; cost-effectiveness analysis and PPBS; social indicators; and future-casting. Their development has contributed to a growing gulf between technique and capability, to a triumph of technique over strategy and a retreat from human values.Attention is directed to specific strategies and tactics of introducing modern management techniques in developing nations. The efforts to do this during the 1960 Development Decade are reviewed. The prospects for the 1970's are previewed, and suggestions offered for problem area task forces and the expansion of U.N. activities in advancing, not merely diffusing, the current state of the art.Since the most significant modern management advances have been tactical, a dozen principles of strategic decisionmaking are suggested: (1) responsible decisionmaking, (2) the conflict essence of problems, (3) selectivity, (4) total system appreciation, (5) relative proportions, (6) sequential model-using, (7) problem interrelationships, (8) jointed incrementalism, (9) organized and unorganized interests, (10) the emotional basis of rational action, (11) investment in future capabilities, and (12) power mobilization and use.The paper ends by raising vital questions on the improvement of managerial values. This is done by specific proposals for a code of managerial ethics and the formulation of more humanistic management goals.     

Crime,punishment and human nature

In Thinking About Crime James Q. Wilson brings a new dimension to crime policy research by explicating the failure of criminologists to adequately consider the philosophical perspectives on man and society which underlie alternate policy options. As a result, they rarely appreciate the inherent limits on government efforts to deal with crime. Wilson's consideration of these limitations, together with a critique of causal analysis in criminological thinking, lead him to propose an alternate conceptual framework, policy analysis. Our inspection of Wilson's own thinking reveals, however, that policy analysis is no less problematic and shortsighted than causal analysis, a result we attribute to serious flaws in his critique of criminological thinking and to the incorporation of his own biases about human nature into his conceptual framework. We seek in the concluding section to remove this bias and to demonstrate how policy analysis may be expanded into a more flexible, multi-dimensional framework, one which accounts for different assumptions about human nature and different policy goals.     

Survey research and racially charged elections: The case of David Duke in Louisiana

Accuracy in measuring vote intention has become a particular problem in elections involving candidates who take conservative positions on racial issues and who emphasize these issues in their campaigns. Consistent understatement of support for such candidates in preelection polls would seem to indicate a reluctance on the part of some survey respondents to honestly express their vote intention, perhaps due to the fear that their intended action might be interpreted as an expression of racism. This research, which utilizes surveys conducted during the 1991 Louisiana governor's election in which David Duke was prominently featured, attempts to develop more accurate alternative measures of support for racially conservative candidates. The findings indicate that more accurate and valid vote intention measures can be constructed through the use of candidate image variables. The findings also call into question the practice of attempting to develop more accurate measures of vote intention through simple reallocation of undecided voters based solely on race.     

Policymaking and technology transfer: The need for national thinking laboratories

The objectives of this paper are to understand what is meant by better policymaking and more efficient technology transfer, to explore what is needed for their achievement, and to suggest an operational mechanism for improving the two processes.The author introduces a few new terms: (1) Inter-context information is defined, and its importance in decisionmaking, policymaking, technology transfer and education is pointed out; (2) a distinction is drawn between incidental technology transfer—initiated by the donor—and organized technology transfer—initiated by the recipient.The author suggests that National Thinking Laboratories should be established to promote organized technology transfer and to act as catalysts to organized policymaking. Their charter should be to match needs in one context to capabilities in another context. This charter is outlined in operational terms by five general objectives listed by the author. The National Thinking Laboratories are most urgently needed, particularly in the developing countries.     

Sincere and strategic voters: An Israeli study

The theoretical literature on voting behavior has shown that a rational voter may sometimes decide to vote for a candidate or party that does not constitute his or her first preference. Such voters are traditionally called strategic voters, in contrast to voters who act sincerely, i.e., those who always vote for their first preference regardless of how others are likely to vote. After discussing some of the problems associated with the definition of these two types of voters and suggesting a new operational definition, some attitudes and characteristics of these two types of voters are investigated. It was found that strategic voters constitute a very small percentage of the entire electorate, that their education level is significantly higher than that of sincere voters, that they tend more often to believe that polls influence voters' decisions and hence tend to delay their own final voting decision, that they tend more often than sincere voters to support small parties but do not tend more often than sincere voters to switch the party they decide to support from one election to the next, and that there is no significant difference between them and sincere voters regarding which governing coalition should/will form following an election.     

Policy termination as a political process

The problem of how to terminate ineffective or outdated public policies, programs, or organizations is increasingly important. This paper argues that it is helpful to conceive of termination as a special case of the policy adoption process: there is a struggle to adopt a policy A, the substance of which is to eliminate or curtail policy B. The main distinguishing feature of this class of policy contests is the activity of vested interests who are able to advance a peculiarly powerful moral claim concerning the inequity or unfairness of change.     

Policy: Constructing a definition

If policies are to serve as guides to real world actions and be subject to criticism and improvement out of human experience, they must have certain attributes and capacities - those requirements serve to define the meaning of the term. This article seeks (a) to demonstrate the substance of those requirements through a systematic analysis of the structures and processes involved in reasoned, corrigible actions, (b) to sketch the basic assumptions of a theory of knowledge able to show how those requirements can be fulfilled within the limits of human capacity, and (c) to examine the implications of that conception of policy, and its companion concept theory, for those involved in collective policymaking and policy studies.     

Changing levels of political information in 1988 and 1990

The 1988 and 1990 National Election Studies indicate that the public is less politically informed in a low-stimulus election year than after a high-stimulus campaign. Although the same factors are responsible for what people know in each year, the process of becoming informed in an information-poor environment is slightly different than in an information-rich atmosphere. The data also show that, just as Angus Campbell's surge and decline theory predicts, core voters are slightly more knowledgeable than peripheral voters.     

Education and mass belief systems: An extension and some new questions

Using the SRC/CPS's national election surveys from 1956 to 1976, this paper investigates the effect of education on consistency among the public's domestic policy opinions. Evidence from both gamma correlations and factor analysis indicates that education has neither a strong nor a linear effect on issue constraint over the 20 years covered by the data, for the lowest and the highest education strata consistently show the highest levels of constraint. We do not conclude, however, that education is unrelated to recognition of ideological concepts, for almost one-half of the lowest education stratum do not use liberal and conservative terms. We conclude that issue constraint does not directly translate into ideology and suggest some new directions that future research should take if we are to evaluate effectively the effect of education on opinion structuring.A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the 1978 Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association.     

Beyond the Running Tally: Partisan Bias in Political Perceptions

I examine the impact of long-term partisan loyalties on perceptions of specific political figures and events. In contrast to the notion of partisanship as a simple running tally of political assessments, I show that party identification is a pervasive dynamic force shaping citizens' perceptions of, and reactions to, the political world. My analysis employs panel data to isolate the impact of partisan bias in the context of a Bayesian model of opinion change; I also present more straightforward evidence of contrasts in Democrats' and Republicans' perceptions of objective politically relevant events. I conclude that partisan bias in political perceptions plays a crucial role in perpetuating and reinforcing sharp differences in opinion between Democrats and Republicans. This conclusion handsomely validates the emphasis placed by the authors of The American Voter on the role of enduring partisan commitments in shaping attitudes toward political objects.     

Political arenas,life styles,and the impact of technologies on policymaking

Public policies are often founded upon or employ specific technologies. Two basic types of technology are distinguished—behavioral and physical technologies—and their contributions to policy and policymaking are discussed. The attractiveness of a technology to policymakers depends on how politically significant groups view the technology's impact on life styles and its implications for the allocation of values. Following Theodore Lowi's groundwork, behavioral technologies generally are perceived to redistribute values (power, respect, wealth, status) and regulate styles of living, while physical technologies generally appear to distribute values, opportunities, and freedom to pursue desired life styles. The policy sciences are given separate treatment as a behavioral technology with both distributive and redistributive aspects. The creative use of physical technology, development of multidisciplinary policy studies, and efforts towards more distributive behavioral technologies are discussed as more relevant and productive for policymaking.     

Why only Nixon could go to China

Right-wing politicians sometimes can implement policies that left-wing politicians cannot, and vice versa. Contemporary wisdom has it that only Nixon could have gone to China. We develop a model to explain this phenomenon. A policy issue could depend on information, on which every one could potentially agree on policy, or on values, on which agreement is impossible. Politicians, who value both reelection and policy outcomes, realize the nature of the issue, whereas voters do not. Only a right-wing president can credibly signal the desirability of a left-wing course of action. The Nixon paradox can hold then if citizens vote retrospectively on the issue.     

The meaning of party labels

To determine the meaning(s) of the concepts Republican, Democrat, and Independent, the most frequently cited attributes of each party label were scaled in terms of their semantic centrality. An analysis of the magnitude scale values demonstrates that the labels Republican and Democrat have unique cognitive properties which easily discriminate one label from another. The most characteristic and discriminating properties refer to (1) voting, (2) electioneering, and (3) other forms of electoral behavior. Although these two labels have many strong properties over which there is considerable agreement, such consensus is lacking for the fewer and weaker properties which characterize and discriminate the label Independent. Whereas Republican and Democrat are sharply delineated, semantic inversions of one another, the concept Independent is ambiguously defined and only weakly distinguishable from other concepts.     

Ideology and the construction of nationality: The Canadian elections of 1993

Canada is one nation, but it is in many ways two communities, one Francophone and the other Anglophone. We employ a formal model of ideology and analyze how nationality is constructed in people's minds. The magnitude of the changes in expressed preferences in terms of ideology depends on the salience of the new issue, the extent to which it confirms with the existing ideological cleavage, and the difference between the perceived status quo on the new dimension and the voter's most preferred alternative. Using data from the 1993 Canadian National Election Study, we consider the relative importance of different policy dimensions in explaining voting decisions among educated Canadians. The issue of Quebec sovereignty, alone, is shown to have significant power for predicting vote choice. A plausible explanation, confirmed here by regression analysis, is that Quebec sovereignty stands for other issues in voters' conception of Canadian politics.     

Public opinion and presidential responsibility for the economy: Understanding personalization

The general mechanisms which underlie the psychological phenomenon ofpersonalizing (cognitive simplification and defensive attribution) would seem to have great utility in explaining attributions of presidential control over the economy. Yet previous research has generated inconsistent and inconclusive empirical results. This study identifies several sources of inconsistency and then attempts to clarify the approach by focusing separately on the object and the subject of personalizing. Our findings suggest that the determinants of personalizing to the president are different from the factors that explain personalizing to the incumbent. In addition, we find that the impact of the two psychological mechanisms differs substantially within economic subject areas.Paper prepared for delivery at the 1984 Annual Meeting of the Southwestern Political Science Association, Fort Worth, Texas.     

Selective adaptation

This paper is critical of some loose speculations about cybernetics, computers and systems, especially as to their role in organization and planning. There is a widespread tendency to believe that human and organizational vagaries can be eliminated by some combination of the former techniques. This tendency is encouraged by a bias towards mechanistic and abstract solutions for social problems. Further, there is a failure to properly take into account natural laws, in the sense of limitations on human and organizational ability, when developing normative models for policy and planning problems. Viable holistic models, supposedly, should replace human and organizational haphazardness; attention has been devoted tosubstituting the machine-techniques for the man, rather than concentrating on man-machine interactions, based on selective adaptations to natural laws.     

What's in a word?

In this paper, we argue that citizens' views about the personality characteristics of their political leaders are subject to systematic bias, motivated by the desire to maintain existing impressions. We report two studies designed to explore how such trait biases, involving judgments of real politicians, are manifested. Drawing on work in social psychology (John, Hampson, and Goldberg, 1991), we hypothesize, and demonstrate experimentally, that traitbreadth plays a critical role in the judgment process. Specifically, people tend to select broad positive traits (e.g., kind) and narrower negative traits (gullible) to describe politicians that they like; conversely, people tend to select broad negative traits (unintelligent) and narrower positive traits (soft-hearted) to describe politicians that they dislike. This trait breadth attribution bias was much stronger among those who had a positive, rather than negative, impression of the politician, a result we discuss in the context of related evidence of affective asymmetries in political judgment (e.g., Kinder, 1986; Marcus and Mackuen, 1993). More generally, these studies illustrate the potential associated with integrating cognitive, affective, and motivational factors in the service of fully understanding political judgment and choice.     

Thematic memory for politics in children

This paper reports on an experiment designed to test the way (fourth grade) children congnitively process various kinds of information about politics. Our findings provide evidence that children integrate symbols from their immediate political environment into themes. These themes may then serve to organize their political knowledge and mediate receipt of new information. We did not find similar evidence of thematic integration for adult political symbols. These findings raise questions about the degree to which events in the adult political world will directly affect children's developing orientations toward that world.     

Interpreting model results — examples from an energy model

With the increasing use of complex computer models for high-level policy decisionmaking, the problem of correctly interpreting and communicating model results becomes a more general concern. This paper traces misconceptions about the use of models to the existence of different conceptions of the term model. Policy models are quite often less theory-based than models in the traditional disciplines, especially in cases where the policy models deal with the long-term developments of sociotechnical systems. The authors examine the use of an example of one such model. Generalising from the authors' experiences in other fields of application, e.g., global modeling, the problems of interpreting model results are discussed. The proper use of future-oriented policy models is clarified by the introduction of typologies implying distinctions, e.g., between forecasting, what-if, and learning models, and between different levels of results, viz. model outcomes, model inferences and policy-issue oriented interpretations.